Amy Qualls is a quilter and Drupalist based in Portland, Oregon.

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quilts

Might as well say it bluntly: I’ve needed time to resume sewing after losing Tenzing. It’s hard to lose your furry sewing buddy and leap right back into the hobby like nothing happened. I’m still not really really all the way back on the horse, but I’m getting there. I’m working my way through a few projects, but I’ve started focusing on the long-paused “Pentatonic.” I spread out the quilt, started assessing what I had cut, and realized I was further along than I’d originally expected.

When I put yesterday’s fresh rounds of travel into TripIt, I saw a line that summed up my year:

You’ve traveled 43,660 mi to 44 locations.

I nodded, thinking to myself about the places I’ve been, the people I’ve met – or reconnected with – and felt profoundly grateful. I’ve been welcome in a lot of places over the past year, slept on a few new couches, met delightfully new recombinations of humanity. All unique, none replaceable.

This morning, while working to finish Invariant, I found myelf reflecting on the travel schedule I’ve been maintaining over the past year and the conflicting effects it’s had on my creative time. My stash has picked up fabric from Denmark, Oregon, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Colorado, Holland, and England.

It’s weird to say that you can walk into fabric stores – which are, by definition, riots of color and print – and feel a little bored, but I’ve been struggling with that in the past year or so as I’ve become more familiar with What’s Out There. There aren’t that many manufacturers of quilting fabric, and there’s a strong faddish element to what’s in / out / hot / not at any point in time.

Cinder and Smoke is a companion quilt to Sea and Sky, which I finished and sent out to a co-worker in our Portland office on the birth of his daughter. I thought it might be nice to use the same pattern again, but add in a bit of a different focus.

While working on Sea & Sky, I removed a few pieces I’d cut because they just didn’t work with the light, bright, clear-toned fabrics I’d chosen: